How Culture is Created and Propagated

Even a thoroughly developed business strategy may fail if you don't pay enough attention to its implementation. This rings particularly true with strategies based on innovation or implemented in complex or fast-changing environments.
In the 20th century successful implementation leveraged stability and typically proceeded through hierarchy and control. Today the key is to stay vibrant and able to quickly respond to trends in competition and technology while not losing sight of the strategic objective. In this course we'll build a toolbox of techniques to execute today's business strategies to help them succeed.
After completing this course, you'll be able to:
- Create objectives and goals to guide strategy implementation
- Identify organizational structures that fit particular strategies
- Understand how to leverage company culture in implementation
- Describe how to communicate the strategy so that the organization "gets" it
- Detect and mitigate risks to implementation

KB

This is excellent course for converting vision to goals and measurables, It provides all the tools and processes required to manage and run organization wide initiatives.

IG

Dec 28, 2015

Filled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled Star

Great! well-organized the final project, and I loved the fact that we had access to the slides at the end of the lesson. It had great value for me. Were very usefull

从本节课中

Leveraging Organizational Culture

Like structure, an organization's culture might be supportive or obstructive in implementation. In this module we define what culture is, learn how it can impact implementation, and explore when and how it can be changed.

教学方

Nicolai Pogrebnyakov

Associate Professor

脚本

To understand how we can use culture to support implementation, let's first look at how culture is created and how it can be changed. Sometimes it might be tempting to try to change the culture and adapt it to the strategy better, but culture can be hard or slow to change. And often, you'll need to leverage culture or cultures that already exist at your organization to drive implementation. The best time to create the culture that supports your strategic vision is when the company is young, when it has just formedm but established companies can sometimes start from blank slate too. At least if not company wide, then it's some of their divisions. In 1982, General Motors had to close down one of its worst plants which was located in Fremont, California. It was so bad that almost 20% of its employees didn't show up for work on any given day. GM then approached Toyota, one of its competitors with an offer to reopen that plant as a joint venture. They reopened the plant in 1983 as NUMMI or New United Motor Manufacturing Incorporated and they changed almost nothing in the way the plant was run. 85% of employees were rehired and the equipment was still the same. The only difference was that now it was Toyota's managers who were in charge not GM's. Toyota introduced a new culture where employees were responsible for maintaining equipment, insuring quota of work and improving the manufacturing process. These are all components of values practiced at Toyota and other Japanese manufacturers, which is know as the Toyota Production System. And four years after they reopened that plant, it was ahead of other GM plants on many counts. For example, it was producing cars twice as fast as the GM Everridge and the quality was among the highest. Once a particular culture is in place, it is propagated in several ways. One of them is to focus your recruiting efforts on people who seem to support the values of your companies culture. And if your organization is growing fast, it's very important to keep control of the culture of new hire's. Because fast growth may change culture and if that change is not controlled the result in culture may not be what you want it to be. After employees are hired into the company, they often go through an orientation or training sessions. This is the time when culture gets passed onto them. First, they observe how existing employees behave and start getting a sense of practiced values in the organization. Second, new hires are often taught espoused values either through explicit lists of values or through stories that encapsulate these values. Managers can also retell such stories to all employees and propagate the culture in that way. Important cultural values can also be propagated with rewards to employees who exemplify these values or with regular events that which such employees are publicly celebrated. As you see, culture is originally shaped when the organisation is young. And if values of the existing culture will support your implementation efforts, you may use some of the techniques we just spoke about to strengthen these values and propagate the culture to make sure that your strategic initiatives will stick.